World Politics

Electoral Systems: A Primer for Decision Makers

Horowitz, Donald L.

Journal of Democracy, Volume 14, Number 4, October 2003, pp. 115-127 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jod.2003.0078

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ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: A PRIMER FOR DECISION MAKERS

Donald L. Horowitz

Donald L. Horowitz is James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University and author, most recently, of The Deadly Ethnic Riot (2001). The present essay is based on a paper written for the electoral-studies group at IKMAS, the Institute for Malaysian and International Studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

To evaluate an electoral system or to choose a new one, it is necessary

to ask first what one wants the electoral system to do. No electoral system simply reflects voter preferences or the existing pattern of cleavages in a society or the prevailing political party configuration. Every electoral system shapes and reshapes these features of the environment, and each does so in different ways. Here, I want to set out several possible purposes of electoral systems that can be found in the literature on the subject and then make some observations about those purposes and the electoral systems that further them. First, however, I need to underscore a point just made about a common assumption—that the best electoral system is the one that straightforwardly and most accurately reflects the preferences of voters. The nature of an electoral system is to aggregate preferences and to convert them into electoral results, and no system can do this as a passive translation of individual wishes into a collective choice. Moreover, every electoral system has biases built into its mechanisms of decision, and these then feed back into the structure of choices...